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Google Sued for $1B Over Outlook Migration Tool
A two-count lawsuit filed by Chicago company LimitNone alleges that Google misappropriated trade secrets and violated Illinois' consumer fraud laws when it developed "Google Email Uploader" which competes with LimitNone's "gMove" application.
"Google claims its core philosophy is 'Don't be evil' but, simply put, they invited us to work with them, to trust them — and then stole our technology,'" said Ray Glassman, CEO of LimitNone, in a prepared statement.
The lawsuit was filed by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, the same commercial litigation group which challenged Google over the company's online advertising system.
A successful lawsuit against Google could be like the small pebble that causes a landslide.
$1B is a ridiculous amount of money for this lawsuit, but even at $10M, a successful suit would bring more lawsuits out of the woodwork.
And I'm willing to bet that once it happened, Microsoft would be more than happy to finance as many as possible.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Emphasis mine. How much money would Google make from their free product? Of course, reading more finds that the claim is that Google is integrating this into their paid product (Google Apps Premier) rather than giving it away for free. Perhaps you knew that, but it wasn't evident in what you said.
Incidentally, there is a better written article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9976405-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
In particular, that article points out that LimitNone is claiming that it divulged technical secrets to Google that Google then used in making its own product. Also, Google apparently changed its Google Apps interface in May of 2008, which caused the gMove product to break. That's apparently the violation of Illinois consumer laws.
Is that related to the differences between Standard and Premier? Apparently Standard does not allow for third party integrations but Premier does. Did Google tell LimitNone that the free version would always support gMove? If so, that will be interesting, as it will help to set expectations around how long Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. have to maintain API compatibility when they want to break it. All of them offer programs like this that allow third party developers to create apps that integrate with their platform. How long are those integrations warranted to work?
The real problem here is not in the relationship between Google and LimitNone but between Google and users of Apps standard edition. Google had been encouraging its users to pay $19 for this product but the functionality no longer works. Further, it apparently stopped working as a result of changes that Google made. If it turns out that it stopped working because Google started charging for something that it previously offered for free, should Google pay back the $19 to users?